


Such Strenuous Living

by MooseFeels



Series: flow morphia, slow [5]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 12:33:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14425497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: It goes like this.(Yuuri asks, and Viktor is honest).





	Such Strenuous Living

It happens like this. 

It happens with Yuuri falling on the pavement as they’re walking, late one night, in the steady patter of rain. Viktor watches Yuuri stumble, fall, on a crack between sections of sidewalk, slip downward, and skin his palm. 

“Ow,” Yuuri hisses. “ _ Fuck _ .”

It’s nearly three am. Yuuri’s work at the lab keeps him busy late into the night, and Viktor doesn’t like for him to walk home alone.

“You spend all day cooped up in that lab,” Viktor told him, when he met him at the bus stop a few blocks back. “I know you  _ must _ want to see people at the end of a day.”

Viktor bends low to help Yuuri up. “Are you okay?” He asks. 

Yuuri nods, scrambling up. He’s watterlogged; the puddle having splashed up to the bottom of his shirt, his pants. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’m fine, I just want to go home.”

Viktor nods. He tucks Yuuri’s arm into his own, pulling him close. Yuuri lets him. 

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri says. “Sorry.”

“This is fine, Yuuri,” Viktor says. “Let us take you home, yes?”

It’s a long walk, from the bus stop to Yuuri’s apartment. His flat is in an old building, down a series of sidestreets. It’s dark. 

“Your hand, is it okay?” Viktor asks.

Yuuri looks down at it, his fingers curled away from his palm. “It hurts,” he says. “I have bandages at home, though.”

Viktor feels his mouth water, just a little, to look at it. 

Viktor doesn’t tell Yuuri that he  _ knows _ what lurks in the darkness, between the bus stop and Yuuri’s apartment, and that’s why he walks him back. Viktor doesn’t tell Yuuri that he is a thing  _ worse _ than anything else hiding in the darkness. 

“How was your day?” Yuuri asks him, his voice soft and sweet. “Did you have tutoring?”

Viktor smiles. “I did, yes,” he says. “Yurio is prickly as ever.”

Yuuri chuckles a little, beside him. “That age is wretched,” he says. “You couldn’t pay me to be fifteen again.”

“Oh,” Viktor supposes. “I don’t know. Dancing. Laughter. Champagne.”

Yuuri chuckles a little. “Russia sounds so different from here,” he says. “At fifteen I think I was still in baseball.”

“I was fifteen so long before you, Yuuri,” Viktor says. “And I was wild.”   
Yuuri laughs. “So much earlier! The difference between twenty seven and twenty four!”

Viktor laughs, too. He doesn’t tell Yuuri that it’s been more than a hundred years since he was fifteen.

Viktor gets Yuuri to the door, and Yuuri fiddles with his keys for a moment before finding the one to the exterior door. 

“Have a lovely evening, Yuuri,” Viktor says, turning to leave.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Yuuri asks. “Please?”

Viktor looks at him, standing in the doorway. 

Viktor licks his lips; he can’t help himself. He smiles. 

“Of course,” Viktor says. “Anything you ask.”

He slips in through the door, following Yuuri up three flights of stairs and to his door. Yuuri fiddles with his keys, unlocking the door and then the deadbolt. 

“Come in,” he says, smiling a little.

Viktor follows. 

Yuuri’s apartment is small. A shoebox. There’s a ratty couch running perpendicular to the doorframe and a brick-and-board bookcase in front of it, full of old paperbacks and what looks like textbooks. Yuuri doesn’t turn on the light, the room brown and yellow from the leak of the streetlight outside. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I just want to get this cleaned.”   
Yuuri steps across the space, dropping his bag by the door and walking into a bathroom. He flicks on the light.

Viktor looks at him, framed by light in the bathroom, looking down at his palm. 

There’s a way Yuuri stands, his hip cocked forward, a book in his hands. There’s something about how he looks down at his hands, his long neck curved gracefully downward, his hair dark against his skin. There’s a way about how the light frames him, curving around him, casting shadow along the round shapes of his body. 

He runs the sink for a moment. He hisses. He grabs a bottle of something from a cabinet and pours it on the wound. 

The sound of the rain fills Yuuri’s apartment. 

Yuuri looks up, from the bathroom, at Viktor. 

Backlit, like this, his expression is unreadable. 

There’s thunder, a low roll, in the distance. 

“Viktor,” Yuuri asks, his voice quiet in the apartment between them, in the strange darkness. “Viktor, if I hadn’t invited you inside, would you have been able to come in?”

Viktor feels everything stop, for just a moment. The air. The rain. The rush and shudder of Yuuri’s blood in his veins. Viktor feels a hidden moment in time, there with the two of them, where everything is still and silent and frozen. 

“Yuuri,” Viktor laughs, breaking that moment. “Yuuri, of course I could, what are you saying?”

“You never eat anything,” Yuuri says. “You don’t even drink anything. And it’s funny, you talk about time in such a strange way. And you never come inside somewhere if you haven’t been invited.”

There’s a pause. Viktor sees something in Yuuri’s silhouette change; maybe it’s the darting of his tongue to wet his pink lips, maybe it’s the flutter of his eyelashes a little lower. 

“I know it’s stupid,” Yuuri says. “This is stupid, Viktor, I’m sorry--”   
“Ask me again,” Viktor says. 

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri says, shaking his head. “This is so stupid, I’m sorry.”

“Ask me, Yuuri,” Viktor says. 

He steps closer, into the light. 

Yuuri doesn’t back away. He stays there, at the threshold of the doorway, before Viktor. 

His hand open between them like a flower. The wound open, the blood fresh on the surface there. 

Yuuri’s hand curls upward, toward Viktor. This close, Viktor sees the brown color of his eyes, the flush of blood on his cheekbones. 

Yuuri looks up at Viktor.

“Viktor,” Yuuri asks. 

Viktor takes the broad plane of Yuuri’s palm into his mouth, and Viktor--

Viktor shows Yuuri that he is the thing in the darkness. 


End file.
